


Just for Show

by tei



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album)
Genre: Gen, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-24
Updated: 2011-04-24
Packaged: 2017-10-18 15:40:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/190420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tei/pseuds/tei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Show Pony came to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just for Show

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to were_duck for the beta. :D

The first time Ricky went outside the city, he tried really, really hard not to.  
"I don't know", he said uncomfortably to Alex. "I don't think it's really safe out there. What's so special about this sport, anyway? If you want sports, you can watch professionals on the telly. No need to go into the desert."

Alex just grinned and yanked him into the car-- Alex's father's car, and he probably hadn't asked before he took it. “What's so special?" Alex said. "Just wait and see." He chuckled. "You'll like it, I promise", he added in response to Ricky's scowl.

You could hear the stadium from a mile away, which was good, because neither of them knew their way around the zones and they had started to get worried when they reached Zone Five on Guano with no sign of any sporting event whatsoever. Alex kept refusing to say where it was that they were going, so Ricky just sat uncomfortably in the passenger seat, sweating and wishing he hadn't agreed to this. Why would anyone do sports out here, anyway? That would just be masochistic. Finally they rolled down the windows as far as they would go and heard a distant uproar. Alex grinned, punched the air and accelerated towards the noise. He slapped Ricky lightly on the shoulder. "Look alive, sweetheart, we're almost there."

"There" turned out to be a huge oval of badly-laid concrete, surrounded by a circle of rope supported by sticks and with a closed-off canvas pavilion at one end, from which shrieks of laughter could be heard. It looked nothing like any sports stadium Ricky had ever seen, but there was an enormous crowd gathered around the oval, pressing on the plank of wood that formed a barrier between the concrete and the sand surrounding it.  
“Is this, like, a beheading, or something?” Ricky asked. Alex just laughed.  
Most of the spectators were dressed as if their clothing had been chosen by an algorithm maximizing the amount of eye-twisting colour on their bodies while minimizing the amount of skin it actually covered. Lots of people were waving flags or holding signs: a group of girls standing near Ricky and Alex were waving a piece of cardboard which said "BAM!" in bright paint, and across the oval one man was standing on the shoulders of two others in order to display a piece of cloth bearing the slogan "Get 'em!"  
Suddenly everyone turned to look at the tent and started cheering and shouting so loudly that Ricky actually took a moment to worry about the possibility of S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W hearing them all the say from the city, before he forced his mind away from being caught and turned his attention to the woman who had just walked out of the tent. She was tall and wide and holding a megaphone. She climbed up on top of a stack of boxes to rising applause, teetered a little, and executed a cautious bow at the heightened applause she received for the admittedly impressive feat of not falling over.  
She raised her hands in the air, flapping them in a “more” gesture, which Ricky couldn't help but feel was rather unrealistic as the crowd already seemed to be basically at maximum in the applause department. He was wrong; the noise swelled and surged as the mass of people stomped, clapped, shouted and whistled. A few blew through brightly coloured plastic horns which produced a sound like giant hornets. The woman grinned and put the megaphone to her lips. "They'd better be able to hear this match all the way from Battery City!" she hollered. Alex clapped Ricky on the shoulder. "C'mon!" he shouted into Ricky's ear. "Noise!"

Hesitantly, Ricky started clapping. It felt good to be a part of what was going on around him. He let out a few quiet cheers which turned more spontaneous when the flap of the tent opened and a stream of women started pouring out. The woman with the megaphone was shouting enthusiastically into it. "Ladies, gentlemen, others, label-abstainers of all descriptions, gallant children of the carburetor, my friends, thank you for braving the zones to be here with us today! Please allow me the almost orgasmic pleasure of introducing-- the Battery-Fueled Betties! I give you: Lady Scorcher!" The first woman out of the tent did a tight pirouette and bowed, grinning hugely at the crowd. The announcer continued: "Speedin' Sadie! Desert Demolition! Emma Dilemma! Betsy Boom!"  
"And, as the opposition-- The Death-Defying Derby Dolls! Please welcome-- Adda Tude! Leena Riot! Killer Kilah...” Ricky tapped Alex on the shoulder and had to practically shout into his ear: “These are their _names_?”  
“Well?” said Alex. “Would you rather be Ricky, or...” the announcer called in the last player-- Lucy Crash-- and Alex gestured in her direction. “Lucy Crash?”

Ricky watched, entranced, as the women started skating around the track. He had seen people skating before-- delivery boys in the city sometimes used sleek roller blades to deliver food and medication-- but this skating was different: the skates just looked like wheels glued to an old pair of shoes and instead of gliding gracefully from house to house like a messenger, they bent over until their stomachs nearly touched their knees and their skates made thunking noises on the pavement, almost inaudible over the crowd. The purpose of the game, as far as Ricky could tell, was to knock people over. And there were certainly people getting knocked over; someone went flying every few seconds, but scrambled to her feet as soon as she hit the ground. Ricky couldn't stop staring.

One girl in particular-- it wasn’t that she was that much more interesting than the rest, but his eyes always seemed to get stuck on her as she skated past. It certainly wasn't because she seemed to be the best; in fact, she caught his eye because he couldn't imagine that she wasn't the worst. The majority of the players looked like they could probably pick up Ricky's scrawny frame and throw him all the way across the playing field; but this girl was at least two heads shorter than the rest, and almost as small as Ricky. He kept an eye on her, assuming that she must be one of the players getting knocked over the most, but after a while, he realized that she wasn't. In fact, it almost seemed like the people around her were falling at odd moments. He watched her carefully as she rounded the corner to be facing away from him. Her arms were covered in tattos, her hair was bleached blonde-- the sun couldn’t produce that kind of yellow, could it?-- and there was a big black "C" spray-painted on the back of her shirt.

He couldn't really tell when the game ended, as he hadn't known the rules in the first place. It didn't seem to end so much as disintegrate; at some point one of the teams seemed to be celebrating a victory, but nobody stopped skating. Eventually both teams were lining up on one of the long sides of the oval and taking turns jumping over teammates lying on the track, with each successful jumper lying down next to the friend she had just managed to not land on. Ricky cheered right along, his stomach hitching a little each time a skater seemed to narrowly miss crushing another. The crowd thinned out a little but those who stayed spread out, spreading blankets on the sand and pulling out reused bottles of home-made alcohol. A small group of people recognized Alex and called them over. By the time night began to fall, Ricky and a friend of Alex’s who, bizarrely, introduced himself as “X, like the letter” had consumed an entire bottle of wine-like drink between them, Alex was lying on his back outlining some sort of bullshit astrology map of the sky that he was probably making up as he went along, and only a few skaters were still on the track, talking and languidly recreating notable plays from the game.

Maybe it was the wine, or more likely X-Like-The-Letter grinning at him and saying, “Go on, you’d probably be _great_ at it!” (He didn’t bother wondering how he knew what Ricky was thinking-- maybe he was just psychic. Or maybe Ricky really was that transparent. And staring.) Somehow he ended up standing in front of the tatooed girl and two others, who had been experimenting with some sort of hip-check, and saying, “Can I join?”

The girl had just set off around the oval when he started talking, and by the time the words had been in the air long enough to require acknowledgement, she was halfway across the track.

"You're a boy", she yelled.

"Sure I am."

"Boys don't skate derby."

 _Derby_ , he thought. _Okay, it has a name._

"I can skate derby as well as any girl", he called, and she spun in two tight circles and came to an abrupt stop just a few feet away from him. "Prove it", she said mildly.

He realized that she meant _now_ , and that he was drunk, and that he had never actually skated before. "Oh", he said, rather brought up short. "Well, I more meant-- hypothetically."

She laughed, not unkindly, and flopped down on the concrete. “Hypothetically, anyone can skate. But if you won’t do it now, why would you be able to do it later?”

“Uh”, said Ricky lamely.

She was untying her laces and pulling her own skates off. She handed them to Ricky, grinning wickedly. “Go on,” she said. “Put them on. I’m Lindsey, by the way. L-Y-N-Z. I’m the captain.” When Ricky just stared dumbly, she added, “That means you have to do what I say.” By now some other skaters had started gathering around them to watch, some of whom laughed loudly at this assertion.  
Ricky sat down awkwardly on the concrete and pulled the skates on. They fit surprisingly well.

The next challenge, he realized, was standing up. He tried to push himself up off of one knee only to have his foot slide out from under him. Lyn-Z just nodded at him to try again. He eventually got into a position which felt like he might be able to stand up-- both if his feet out in front of him, leaving him leaning backwards to touch the ground in a kind of lopsided squat. He braced himself and attempted to stand up slowly.

The next thing he knew he was gasping for breath as something fast and heavy hit him from behind. Suddenly he was on his feet, moving at an incredible speed, his legs felt like they might collapse any moment, and one of Lyn-Z’s friends was holding him tightly around the waist, both keeping him from falling over and pulling him forward.

“You didn’t quite seem like you were giving it your all”, she shouted into the rushing air, pulling him into the right angle to get around the curve. “I figured you probably just needed someone else’s all in the small of the back to prevent you from making that mistake again.”

“Uh,” he gasped, “thanks?” She giggled and let go of him without warning. All of a sudden his legs started refusing to stay on the proper sides of his body. He remembered at the last moment that there was a rubber stop on the front of the skate, tried to put a toe down and ended up tripping over it instead. He landed hard on his stomach and, for a moment, could only lie on the ground, gasping for air.

The first thing he realized, when he regained enough cognition to process incoming sounds, was that everyone was laughing at him. He couldn’t really blame them. He pushed himself gingerly to his knees, being very careful to not let the treacherous wheels touch the ground, flipped himself over and began to untie the skates.  
Lyn-Z knelt down and started untying the second skate. She was still giggling and all Ricky could think about was what would be the quickest escape route once he got the damn skates off his feet when she said, “That was the most fucking epic wipeout I’ve seen... well, I won’t say today, because there were some pretty epic wipeouts today, but at least in the last hour and a half. Welcome to the team, man. What was your name again?”  
“What?” said Ricky.  
“Your name, soldier!” She grinned and pulled her skate off his foot. “I don’t know how we could turn you down after a performance like that.”  
“Ricky”, he said. “I... wait, really?”  
“Of course!” She reached out her hand and pulled him to his feet. “Look, you honestly think people come here to watch skilled sportspeople exhibiting the highest in tactical ingenuity? Of course not. They come to see sweat and blood and dirt and struggle and everything you can’t get in the city. They come for a _show_. That said, you will need to actually learn how to skate.”  
By this time all of Lyn-Z’s team was gathered around him, as well as most of the remaining spectators. “Oh”, he said, suddenly very pleased with himself.

“Cool. Okay.” He waved confusedly to the people crowding around him, who were starting to get rather fuzzy.  
“Right”, said Alex, “I think it’s time to get back to the city.”

It wasn’t until Ricky and Alex were almost back in the city, driving faster than was safe but not sober enough to care, that Ricky turned to Alex and said, “So you can borrow your dad’s car again, right?”  
Because, well, he needed the car. Lyn-Z had told him what to do: way up in the radio stratosphere, where no good citizen ever though to turn the dial, was a radio station that it seemed like everyone at the derby had known about but him. He should listen to the broadcasts, she said, and every week a guy named Death Defying would announce what day the next practice was. A practice would be announced at least a week in advance, a game a month. “It’s slow-moving”, she had said, “but it’s safer that way.”  
When he mentioned this to Alex, he got a snort. “Yeah, right,” he said.  
There was stony silence in the car until Alex finally pulled up outside of Ricky’s building. “Sorry if your parents kill you”, he said. He paused. “And yeah”, he said finally, “I can probably get the car for practice.”

The first practice, Lyn-Z took the pair of old shoes he had brought and did something with a glue gun and spare parts. He looked at the result and felt oddly proud of them. He’d never really had anything he had to hide before. Sneaking off into the desert was one thing; this was tangible evidence that he was doing something _different_. He put them on, fell down, got up, and managed to complete an entire lap around the track before flopping over in exhaustion.  
“You’re not just going to sit there the whole time”, said Lyn-Z sternly. “And you’re not going to get better if you sit down every time you’re tired. Look. I’m running drills with the blockers. This is one of our jammers, Kilah. She’s going to teach you how to skate.” Kilah was a head taller then Lyn-Z and looked at Ricky like he was a particularly attractive cut of meat. Ricky tried to return the look, but by the end of the practice his legs were so wobbly he could barely sit down to take his skates off, let alone swagger confidently to the car as he had kind of been hoping to.  
After a few practices, he was finally able to not stagger straight to the car afterwards, and he and Alex-- who usually hung around to watch, sitting in the hood of the car with a radio beside him-- found themselves sitting around the track until late with the rest of the team. Nobody bothered taking their skates off, and after a while Ricky asked how they all got home, as Alex’s was the only car parked around the arena.  
“We live out here”, the woman who called herself Emma Dilemma said to him one day after practice. “Who do you think those radio broadcasts announcing the practices are for? That’s Dr. D. He keeps us all connected. Soon you’re gonna move out here with us.” She sounded confident o this, and all of a sudden Ricky felt like he was on the edge of a cliff. He _could_ do that.  
He was listening to more and more of the illicit radio broadcasts. He found himself turning to 109 by default whenever he was looking for entertainment, even for the news, which he had previously assumed could only be accurate when broadcast from BLI headquarters. It was certainly true that the types of news stories that come from Dr. D’s station were _different_ \-- it seemed like every day someone was getting “ghosted”, which Ricky soon realized meant dead, or something like it. You never heard about people dying from BLI broadcasts.

And there was music that he had never heard before-- music which sounded different, and although he couldn’t quite place what felt so forbidden about it he always turned off the radio real quick if he heard footsteps approaching while he was listening.  
Dr. D also told stories on his radio station. Ricky found himself utterly unable to tell if they were true stories or not; for they seemed to be about the place where he lived, but at a time before it was the way he saw it. Before there were the Zones and the city; before the food delivery came in the morning and before Dr. D’s broadcast had to be talked about only in whispers.

Dr. D says that during the Helium Wars, whatever group of people had most recently taken to calling themselves the Government would pass out pamphlets about how citizens should protect themselves from all the other groups who were not currently the Government. These pamphlets contained advice such as: if your home is attacked by the Enemy, do not panic. Turn off all the lights, press at least one chair against each door and take cover in a secluded place.  
Everyone knew that this wasn’t going to protect you from helium bombs. It wouldn’t even protect you against someone with a raygun. But still the Government churned out this advice, and still the people read it and followed it to the letter. Not because they were stupid or brainwashed; that came later. But because some instinct said that maybe a whole bunch of practically useless measures might add up to one saved life. Or maybe it was that dangerous principle, “better than nothing”. So still they turned out all the lights and ducked and covered and they still died, but at least they had made an effort. Some kind of symbolic effort, a last protest telling the world, “I don’t want to die.”

Yeah, the security around the arena was something like that.

They saw the cars coming from miles off. That was the advantage of the desert; nobody could sneak up on you, especially if they were driving huge sleek shiny cars throwing out reflected radiance from the afternoon sun, looking like balls of white fire hurtling through the sand towards the makeshift stadium. Of course, the flip side of it being impossible to be snuck up on was that it was also pretty impossible to run away.  
That is, Ricky assumed, until he realized that all of the skaters except for him were crowded around Lyn-Z, who was crouching just off the end of the track and was digging her fingers eagerly into a patch of what appeared to be grass, until the whole thing uprooted and Ricky realized she had pulled up a trapdoor, which the grass had been allowed to grow over, and was herding the skaters down it as quickly as she could. Ricky headed for it, calling for Alex. He was sprinting towards Ricky with a look of terror in his eyes which said _I regret it, I regret everything._ Cheap thrills were fun but this was something else and Ricky and Alex both knew it.  
Lyn-Z was shouting curses at them and there was no disobeying that voice: before he knew it he was half-climbing, half-falling down a wooden ladder and onto a patch of dry earth, nearly on top of someone else. He felt Alex beside him, trembling, and saw the square of light slowly close. There was a moment of chaos until Lyn-Z’s voice cut through it from above, and as Ricky’s eyes adjusted he could see her climbing steadily down the ladder. “Hey!” she shouted, and there was a sudden silence.  
“Listen up,” she said unnecessarily. “There’s a reason none of you have been down here before; it’s one-time-use only, and we’re not likely to get or hands on the machinery to make another one after today. But this tunnel leads directly to Dr. D’s current station. We’ll be following it there, then covering it in as soon as we’re all out. Now. The Dracs will be here in a minute. The first thing they’re gonna do is give us all a chance to surrender and be taken back to the city scot-free. They’re not lying, neither.” She paused. There were some contemptuous spitting noises, as well as a few thoughtful murmurs. “Anyone who wants to go, you have my blessing and more. There’s no guarantee we’re going to make it out of here alive. And anyone who stays certainly isn't going to make it back to Battery City. So go back, if you like, and hope that maybe you’ll make it out again one day.”  
Almost as soon as she had finished, there was the sound of cars braking above their heads and a deep voice in a megaphone: “Surrender, and you will be spared. Surrender, and you will be cared for.”  
There was dead silence in the bunker, until suddenly a tall woman stepped forwards. “I’m sorry, Lyn-z”, she said. “My son is in the city. I can’t never see him again.”  
Another woman came forwards wordlessly. Then Ricky felt a rustle beside him and saw Alex, eyes indistinct in the darkness but still saying loud and clear _I’m sorry._  
There was a moment where Lyn-Z was looking at him expectantly, and he almost stepped forwards to stand beside Alex. But some mad urge, maybe the same insane voice which had said _ask to join the team_ , now whispered _stay_.  
Lyn-Z stepped out of the way of the ladder, and the three started climbing up. Suddenly she turned to the rest of of the assembly. “Let’s go!” she practically shouted. “Run!” She had grabbed a flashlight off the dirt wall and was illuminating the path of the tunnel with it. The skaters didn’t have to be told twice; they took of in the direction she pointed. Only Ricky stood a moment extra, watching Alex ascend the ladder, and Lyn-Z nearly crashed into him as she too started running.  
“Run!” she shouted in his ear. “Show Pony, _run!_ ”  
And he ran.


End file.
